The Obscure Cult Game That’s Secretly Inspiring Everything

Two youths on an adventure together, having just come through dangerous territory, spy a nearby bench and sit on it to rest, taking a quiet, serene moment before their next trial.

If you saw that scene in a recent videogame, would it make you think of an old game called Ico? If so, we’re on the same wavelength.

I’d already been getting a bit of an Ico vibe from this new Xbox game I was playing, called Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but the benches clinched it. These, I thought, had to be an homage to the similar repeated scenes in that cult classic, released in September 2001. It was a feeling I’d been getting a lot recently. Almost 12 years after its quiet debut on Sony’s then-new PlayStation 2, Ico (ee-koh) seems to be more popular now than it ever was then. What was once an obscure niche game is now increasingly cited as a source of inspiration for current games. And I don’t just mean indie efforts like Brothers. It’s also cited as an influence on the biggest of the big triple-A blockbusters, like Halo and Uncharted. Everywhere you look, you’re standing in Ico’s shadow.

“Ico [was] one of the first games that tried to evoke emotions from the player,” Brothers director Josef Fares said in an email to WIRED. “Ico was the starting point and proof that emotions can exist in games, kind of a wake-up call for designers. Thankfully, we are [now] seeing many games trying and succeeding in doing the same thing.”

Ico was the creation of a total unknown named Fumito Ueda, who joined Sony’s game development studio after a brief stint at the Tokyo game developer Warp. At the time Ueda joined in 1997, Sony’s internal game development efforts were still getting off the ground; it had only entered into the game console business by launching the original PlayStation a few years before. In contrast to its chief rival Nintendo, Sony’s game platforms were largely popular based on the strength of third party software, not home-grown titles. But this meant that Sony was very much in search of young upstarts to come in and create something unique for PlayStation.

Taking inspiration from the minimalist design of an influential 1991 game called Another World, Ueda engaged in what he would later call “design by subtraction,” trimming away much of what had come to define action videogames in an effort to create something more artistically cohesive. Ico would tell a story of a boy and a girl trying to escape a castle full of traps, but it would do it with an economy of storyline sequences and gameplay mechanics. Like Another World, the screen had no “heads-up display” elements like a life meter or ammo count. Where other games gave the players an arsenal of different weapons, Ico‘s hero had to make do with a stick.

Ico. Image: Sony Computer Entertainment

“Ico is not about a boy and a girl escaping from a haunted castle or fighting shadows with a stick,” says Raul Rubio, CEO of game developer Tequilaworks. “Ico is a game that transmits strong emotions about solitude, injustice, loss, death, sacrifice, overcoming your own limitations and how two helpless entities can overcome any challenge if they take care of each other. Like a Miyazaki or Disney movie, there’s a deep meaning behind these cartoony images. It’s also a really simple yet deep story, a classic tragedy.”

Unfortunately, not very many players at the time got to experience those feelings. About a year after Ico was released, I spoke with Ueda and he said that the minimalist style of the game was a big negative for Sony’s marketing efforts. In 2001, you made consumers aware of games by putting screenshots into print magazines. By looking at the feature lists and screenshots showing the heads-up display elements, gamers could figure out what type of game it was. Ico was not understandable through screenshots and its gameplay mechanics could be described in a single paragraph. Even with a worldwide release backed by a Sony marketing campaign, it barely cleared half a million units.

But still, it hung on in the minds of those who did experience it and its sequel Shadow of the Colossus performed much better in the sales charts (if still not anywhere close to blockbuster status). Nowadays, if you ask the developers of games with close relationships between their characters about their inspirations, you hear Ico come up quite a bit.

“I think there’s a lot of similarity in just the core relationship between the boy in Ico and Princess Yorda, and Chief and Cortana, that bond they have, that need to be there for one another,” Halo 4‘s creative director Josh Holmes told Time on its release last year. “I’ll always be influenced by that game, probably in ways that I don’t even understand, because it’s definitely one of the pinnacle moments in my gaming career.”

During the development of Uncharted 3 on PlayStation 3, Naughty Dog creative director Nate Wells name-checked Ico as “the kind of game… we’re focused on making right now.” And while film director Guillermo del Toro loves many different videogames, he said in 2008 that Ico and Colossus were the “only two games I consider masterpieces.”

While one kind of has to take Holmes’ and Wells’ word for it about Ico‘s influence on their largely dissimilar mass-market blockbuster games, its influence is much more tangible when one examines some recent titles from smaller studios. Vander Caballero cited it as a strong influence on the gameplay of his semi-autobiographical game Papo & Yo last year. Fez creator Phil Fish says he relied on Ueda’s “design by subtraction” ethos in making his game.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Image: Starbreeze Studios

“Ico is definitely an inspiration,” said Brothers director Josef Fares, but says that in his opinion, “even more” of an influence were 16-bit role-playing games from the Super Nintendo, like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. “That’s actually why Brothers is a top-down game,” he says; the bird’s-eye-view camera is meant to mimic the angles used in those early classics.

All I can say is that I’m intimately familiar with all of those games as well and never got a Super Nintendo flashback from Brothers — from the way it wordlessly conveys the relationship between the two characters through simple gameplay actions, to the natural, quiet, serent beauty of its environments, to the way its levels are structured around giant pieces of machinery and dizzying climbs up crumbling architecture, it felt much more Ico than Secret of Mana to me.

Another recent game being compared to Ico is Rime, by Raul Rubio’s studio Tequila Works. To be published by Sony as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, Rime‘s debut trailer gives off some seriously heavy Ico vibes right from the start. The main character wakes up on a beach wearing a flowing tunic that looks just like the costumes worn by the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus main characters, runs and climbs through abandoned, crumbling ruins, then slashes at a group of encroaching shadow-monsters by swinging a stick around.

“More than Ico itself, we wanted to create an evocative experience, something that it’s a tale on the surface but with a touching and deep meaning under the skin,” said Rubio. “In that sense, we’d say that there are very few proposals like that on games.”

Rubio says that Ico and Rime share a common ancestor. “The closest visual influence to Ico would be the Italian surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico, who was a direct visual influence on Ico too, and how it represents emotions through architecture.”

As other developers create games inspired in heavy part by Ico, Fumito Ueda’s team seems to be struggling with creating the next game in the series. Sony announced The Last Guardian for the PlayStation 3 back in 2009 and announced a 2011 release date shortly thereafter. Ueda showed a demo of the game in March 2011… and then it disappeared. Sony insists it is still in development; perhaps after disappointing players with a long delay and a descent into development hell, it doesn’t want to speak of The Last Guardian again until it is absolutely sure it will be able to release it shortly thereafter. Ueda left full-time employment at Sony, which says he is finishing the game as a contractor. At least in the interim, Sony re-released Ico and Shadow of the Colossus on PlayStation 3 so that latecomers could find out what all the fuss was about.

As painful as the wait for The Last Guardian has been, it’s been made markedly better by what’s happened to the game industry in the meantime — game developers that were inspired to enter the field by games like Ico are now turning out homage after homage to Ueda’s debut classic. In this they are aided by lowered costs of development and digital distribution, and they no longer have to worry that players won’t understand screenshots in a magazine because it is now possible to reach them in more precise ways.

And when a player today looks at a game with a stark visual style and a minimalist approach to gameplay mechanics, they no longer struggle to understand what sort of game it is. “Oh,” they just think, “so it’s like Ico.”